"Turns the hot light off and the cool one on, and all of a sudden there's peace."

I've spent a lot of time over the last year thinking about control; who or what has it, how do we lose it, why it's important. I knew for a few years that alcohol had too much control over my life. I wouldn't have described it that way in the thick of it of course, but that's what it was. In order to take back control, I would go to great lengths to plan when I would drink and what I would drink. I would do Dry January and the Whole 30 to have a reason to be alcohol free. I never won though. Until the day I let alcohol go.

I love the way Brick in Tennessee Williams' "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof" explains his drinking. He needs enough to get where the click in his head happens. Once he gets that "click", he's at peace and he can stop. Over time, it takes more and more to get to that moment. That is the clearest explanation I have ever read of what alcohol was for me. I just needed to get to the moment where my brain would click, when it would stop bouncing around, when the noise would stop bothering me, when all my worries (old and new, real and imaginary) would melt away. I recently read Rachel Hollis' "Girl Wash Your Face" and she mentioned that same line from Williams' play when describing her "need" for a drink vs a "want".

Is that not the most perfect way to describe losing control? You're trying to get control over your mind and your emotions, so you give control to a substance that can eventually make you stop caring. That isn't control. That is the absence of control.

Maybe you're reading this and saying, "Well that's great for you, but I don't drink like that!" Awesome! Here's the thing: over the last year I have learned that many of us have something in our lives we have given control to. It could be food, alcohol, drugs, sex, or maybe it's not as evident: perhaps we allow our thoughts about our value to control us, others opinions, our fear, or as my dear friend and mentor LB Adams has described, our script....the script that has been written for us based on what others have said and have determined about us along the way. These are all things we give our control to. And the act of grabbing it back can take courage. In my case it was less courage and more dumb luck. I simply wanted control back. I wanted to feel and believe that I was as valuable and as strong and as amazing as I was pretending to be. I've always been told I had great confidence. I wanted to be a woman with confidence for REAL. And while dumb luck got me to the point where my control landed back in my hands, it took courage to hold on to it and own in. Because now I can't blame anything or anyone but myself. I get to own my life fully and completely, the good, bad, ugly, and fabulously amazing. And that is worth everything.